Virginia L. Parks, Assistant Professor, School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago, and Dorian T. Warren, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Columbia University, will study grassroots community resistance to “big box” retail stores in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Parks and Warren argue that local conflicts over Wal-Mart and its high profile as a low-wage employer expose new cleavages in contemporary urban politics and obstacles to addressing urban inequality, including widening class divides within minority communities and increasing racial divides within working-class communities. In a project that uniquely combines urban politics and urban geography, Parks and Warren will compare campaigns in these three cities by drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, public opinion polls, interviews, and descriptive statistics.